RadioMaximus: play and record Internet Radio

RadioMaximus is a free portable program for Microsoft Windows devices that you may use to play and record Internet Radio.

The program is available as a free, limited version and a pro version. The free version supports all the basic features that you would like to see in an Internet Radio application: you can browse and search radio stations, play them, and record stations on top of that.

The free version is provided as a 32-bit and 64-bit program for Microsoft Windows. While it comes with an installer, it can be extracted to a location for use as a portable application if that is desired.

RadioMaximus

The interface of RadioMaximus is divided into three panes: the main toolbar at the top, the left sidebar that lists various program features and options, and the main pane that lists the actual radio stations.

You can run searches for stations or use the browse option instead on first start. Stations may be added to the favorites for easier access, so that you may use the option to access stations faster on future uses of the program.

The search finds stations based on genre but also name. One feature that is not supported is the ability to search for specific songs that you are interested in. A program like streamWriter handles this better, as it returns radio stations that play specific songs when you use the search (provided the radio stations supports this).

The browser supports browsing stations by countries, genres, new stations, and popular stations. You may add stream URLs to the program as well using the new station option in the toolbar. This is useful if one of your favorite stations is not supported by the application.

A click on a station starts playback right away. RadioMaximus displays artist and song names, quality information and a cover if supported by the station.

One interesting feature of the program is that it may play multiple stations at the same time. To be precise, only one station is played actively, but you can switch between different stations that are playing to play these without any delay.

RadioMaximus highlights new songs that get played in each of these stations making it a useful feature to switch between stations to avoid songs you are not interested in, and play songs that you like.

You can record any station that plays right away with a click on the record button. Options include splitting or not-splitting songs into individual tracks, recording the current song only, or to time recordings.

Recordings can be scheduled as well. This is useful for instance to record your favorite radio shows, or record multiple radio stations at once regularly using the application.

The scheduling options are quite extensive. You may set start days and times, the desired duration, end actions, and more using the configuration menu.

RadioMaximus supports keyboard shortcuts for most operations. You can hit Ctrl-R to start a recording for instance or switch between streams using the F2 (next) and F3 (previous) keys on the keyboard.

Verdict

RadioMaximus is a user friendly Internet Radio program for Windows that you can use to play and record radio. The feature that I like the most is the ability to tune into multiple streams at once to switch between them without lag.

Search and recording options are somewhat limited when compared to top of the class recorders such as streamWriter, but they should be sufficient for most users.

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Comments

I listen to internet radio regularly and have for years. I was surprised that Radio Maximus got updated as it rarely gets updates, but as the change log notes, all they did were apply unspecified “Minor bug fixes”.

I don’t understand this author who has 3 similar audio programs (RarmaRadio, TapinRadio and RadioMaximus) that have hardly been updated over the years. Why not just focus on one program?

I have Audials and Rad.io (http://www.radio.net/) installed on my PC and on my cell phone. I prefer both of these services to Radio Maximus. I think they both allow recording although I don’t do that myself. Why record tracks when you have radio stations from virtually every country in the world to listen to? Can’t beat that for variety!

Jojo, yes I don’t understand the author as well. The programs have overlapping functionality for the most part. I think one of the appeals of recording Internet radio is that you have access to these songs then without having to have an Internet connection. This depends mostly on how you use your devices though and the Internet plans you are subscribed to.

“Why record tracks when you have radio stations from virtually every country in the world to listen to? Can’t beat that for variety!”

Indeed. I’ll agree with Martin when it comes to a specific song you’ve been searching for : “hey! it’s playing, let’s record it!” even if that requires a stand-by attitude! Maybe as well when a concert is announced… but radio recording is also and maybe mainly performed by “download it all” fans, the same that get all excited at downloading songs, videos in mass without hardly ever listening to, viewing them afterwards. A deep incursion of those mentalities shows addiction for propriety far more than for usufruct. Some will always prefer to possess an old car than to have the usufruct of a Ferrari. “I have it, it’s mine, here in my computer, yeah, I don’t need it, maybe I don’t even like that song or video, but I have it, yeah!”. Sad.

I understand your criticism and love your comments but comparing it to your usual ones I get the impression you had a bad day. Hope you feel better, soon. And I am not trying to make fun of you, either.

@Teddy, no hard day (CET here), only perhaps a latent misanthropy making its way on particular topics, such as gathering for the sake of gathering, which we all know is the disease of uncomfortable souls. Gathering here means downloading everything you can even if you don’t need it. Recording radio is often led by such a state of mind, not always, ad downloading not always either, when done with brains and not performed because of an hysterical nervous system.

I hope you don’t mind me expressing my point of view.

For those who download, whatever, for the sake of the object (radio, audio, video, files…) and not for the fun or the profit of gathering because gathering made free, the count me in. Not otherwise.

Back to RadioMaximus which certainly has more valuable options than the only radio streaming download.

Tapin Radio is now shareware ($20) and no longer free. It also appeared to me that the maker of this software has changed or removed a lot of stations. There is always the no longer developed Screamer radio but, as said, it is outdated. Too bad, Tapin was a very good radio, easy and simple.

Same here. FB2K for playback and Streamripper for recording. I used to run Streamripper manually from the command line, but now I’m using a simple foobar plugin (foo_run, “Run Services”) to automate the launching of Streamripper from web radio playlists. You can get such lists from many places, e.g. most Linux media players. Personally, I just browse shoutcast.com and copy any streams URLs I like.

I prefer the DIY approach, instead of installing dedicated programs for every little thing.

One way or another I’ve been listening to Internet radio for decades for otherwise unobtainable variety. I don’t record it as I’m rarely impressed by a specific work, but I do like information about the song and the station and the country and bit rate, etc. For ease of use I’m perhaps naively impressed by Radio Maximus.

I use Stream Writer, but recently discovered that you can’t even make a note about a station, writing down the reasons why you selected it, jotting down the schedule for the programs you prefer… Also, when renaming stations (which is a poor substitute for annotation), the previous name disappears, instead of lying there gently waiting to be modified.

P.S.: there are very good reasons to download things, instead of just relying on a search mechanism in the future. Man has always collected things, and that must be for a reason.

It’s easy to find tons of things through search engines on the Web. It’s much more difficult to find something you’re actively and specifically looking for. So when you’ve found it and it’s important to you, it makes much sense to save it locally, with your own classification system, in order to be sure it will stay there in the future.

It may be free, but it’s still proprietary, not open source. No spyware? Well, unless the author gave you the source code to look through and you can work in a reproducible build, then you have no way of knowing whether a proprietary program is completely free from spyware.

I listen or record internet radio occasionally. Some stations I liked gone or restricted to own apps I have no time for. As for listening I used RadioSure a lot, but for recording I used AIMP, giving it URLs taken from RadioSure

So the article states this is a free program, but according to the Help>About window, it’s a 14-day trial. What happens after the trial expires? I can’t find any information on the author’s web site about that, or what’s different about the “Pro” edition. Anyone know from past experience? Martin, have you been running it long enough to know?

Coincidentally, I had just started using RarmaRadio (same vendor) a couple of weeks ago, and was thinking about purchasing it. Now I see he has two virtually identical programs….weird.

It continues to run. I tested this only by changing the system’s date to August though, but when I ran the program, it worked just fine. Cannot say if some functionality stops working, but I did not notice anything.

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